The Cards
by operation Mystic Waters
Summary: The year is 1415. Average kids. Average world. Above average game. Are the cards really going to destroy them all?
1.

The Cards

the beast

"Hey, Hesepti, come here a minute," Draco said.

She glared at him. Draco Scott, older twin to Alex Scott, and far more obnoxious and despised by her. His black hair was spiked and glistened in the pale light, and the lamp shadowed his black eyes. She wasn't the least bit interested in what he was doing.

"See these?" He asked, motioning to his desk and pretending to ignore the shots at his head. "These are called Clow Cards. I bought them online, and they tell a person's future if you can read them right. Their whole life, if they ask. They're from an old TV show back in 2000. Sit down and ask me a question."

"Will you ever stop being such a dick head?" She muttered, and turned back to her English homework. English, she had decided, was the evil above all evils. She worshipped science and excelled in math, but the art of speech was something that her cold blood would never absorb. Sure, the grammar was easy, but it was all of the flowery talk that she didn't get- why not just kill the bad guy the first time you see him, in cold blood, and that way he doesn't kill your entire family and you don't spend months hunting him? Killing with your bare hands wasn't easy, but it sure was a heck of a lot easier than spending all you have finding him a second time. And who needed poetry? Who needed love? They weren't the essentials in life. Happiness could be gained through achievement- wasn't the point of hunting the bad guy down revenge?

"No, I mean something you want to know about. Yes and no questions don't work."

"Then I guess your cards aren't so magic after all, are they, dick head?"

He scowled and turned back to his cards. "I'm going to find out how my birthday's going to go tomorrow."

"Have fun. And as long as you're playing fortune teller, maybe you should try to 'predict' just how bad you're going to get smacked when your parents find out that you left your brand-new cyber snake outside."

His blood ran cold. "Crap!" He leapt from his desk and bolted out the door.

She smiled coolly as her amber eyes waltzed with the raindrops outside the window. The boy would never reveal her, of course, or he would to his twin. Lose to Alex in a foolish competition for her- the shrew of shrews. Her Egyptian name even meant that she was hard to get along with. They were just ordinary people, selfish and emotional, fighting like typical males for dominance. She hated them all.

"Hep?" A soft face peered into the room. She ignored him. "Did you really put his snake outside in the rain?"

She paused, despising his innocence. They were like opposites; while Draco was more cold and straightforward, Alex was shy, lacked confidence, and the definition of gullible. No matter how many pranks she pulled on him, he always had a bashful smile for her. Didn't he get it? There was a fine line between flirtatious teasing and cruel jokes.

"Yeah. So?"

"Why are you so mean?" He inquired, his eyes glistening much more naturally than his sibling. "You might have more friends if you tried to be nice for a change."

"And you might be more appealing if you weren't such a little wuss."

"I'm not a wuss... I have the guts to talk to you, which more than half the kids in our school will do."

"Just buzz off, Alex."

"They keep saying that you're a bully-"

"Shut up."

"- but you really just want to be left alone-"

"I said shut up!"

"- and you won't tell anyone why!"

"GET OUT!" She shouted, infuriated. He retreated. She sighed, and looked down at the desk covered in cards. She lifted one.

"Arrow?" She wondered. "What could it mean?" She asked, glancing out the window once more. "The Arrow..."

~~~~~~~~

I don't own card captors. Please R & R.


	2. 

The Cards

the raptor

"Arnurna, did you hear about the new arcade opening at the mall?"

"No."

"They're supposed to have this new M.U.D.[1] that nobody's supposedly ever seen. It was, like, banned from being released to the public for a couple of decades."

"You serious, Pelagie?" 

"Yeah. It was supposed to be dangerous or something, but I guess they fixed it."

"What was wrong with it?"

"I dunno, I think it was something about the simulations being too scary. One guy died from a heart attack- I read about it online when I was doing my science paper last quarter."

She sighed. "The topic was on how radiation affected cancer. How the heck did you stumble across a heart attack?"

"Well, you know, I just wanted to make sure that... um..." Her face began to redden.

"What?"

"Ok, ok, he I saw this picture of the head scientist, and he was REALLY hot. I just kinda scanned the article, since they sometimes put extra information on some people..."

"Let me guess," she muttered dryly. "You were looking for his phone number?"

"Well, you know, that was before I met Argath, and-"

"Oh, hush, I don't care about your boyfriend, and I don't care how you spend your free time, either." She thought a moment, poised over their current science poster. "But I _would_ like to hear more about this game."

She giggled. "Ok, like I said, the idea's really old, but these people like, inherited Yahoo_!_ and they put a lot of money in to it, so now it's out. It was pretty old to begin with, actually- the whole theory of the game was devised when that totally hotty came across some old DVD's-"

"DVD's?"

"Yeah, you know, what they recorded old television shows on in the twenty-first century."

"Hm. Maybe I should take technological history. NOT! Keep talking."

"Ok, so anyways, he had a really old game consol stored in his attic, and a 2-D TV too, and he watched them, and decided that the plot and characters sucked but the universe was cool."

"Which was...?"

"He calls it "Spirit Card" Space."

"Hm. Ok, so what do you mean by "universe" and "space"?"

"Well, it's just an alternate reality. You know, like you might say MunchCroc lives in "MunchCroc" Space or something."

"Don't pick on my number one game, man. So what was it that he liked about it?"

"Well, um..." She smiled uneasily. "The article didn't really go much beyond to say that there are these cards with, well, spirits dwelling inside of them."

"So, what, you collect them?"

"I dunno, I think that's what the movies did, but the game's probably completely different."

"Well, ok, if you think so. When's it opening?"

"Not sure, but we can go check tomorrow- it's already ten o' clock, we should probably get ready for bed."

"Yeah..."

~~~~~~~

the death

The room is dark except for a single bright beam shining down on one person. Strapped to a chair, head drooping, the prisoner has just woken. His eyes are misty, lingering in the drug's effects, but he is still able to process the words in his ears. His mind groggily wakes and the entire situation finally clicks.

"Why the hell am I the one?!"

"You know everything."

"I don't know shit."

"You hacked into our files. You read our data."

"So? That doesn't mean I remember it all, or that I understood it!"

"You got past everything, you accessed every file chronologically, you copied it into your computer and we observed you reading all of the data. You understood it, you even commented on it."

"How the hell...?"

"There is a type of virus that we use to access every computer with access to us."

"This is bullshit. I'm not doing anything for you guys."

"Yes you will."

"Kiss my ass!"

"The rewards," he began, and pulled out slip of paper, "will be great."

"I don't want your bullshit money."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to leave me the fuck alone!"

"..... We can't do that." He slipped the paper back into the shadow, and two elaborately decorated cards were passed to him.

"The fuck is this?"

"The Create and the Dream."

"I said I'm not doing your shit!"

"Ah, but you are wrong. Very wrong. You will face seven opponents, detectives, civilians, and one of you will be victorious. You have read the data- either you will win, or the single hero. It's very simple."

"It's fucked up bullshit, that's what it is."

He smiled in the dark.

~~~~~~~~~

[1] M.U.D.- multi-user dimension.

I don't own Card Captors.


End file.
